The Media in a Market-Driven Society PDF

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Dr Nathan Farrell...

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The Media in a Market-Driven Society Assignment:  Use the quote as a Segway to impartiality and biased  Construction of news and journalism  Practical limitations of all the news that’s fit to print  Prioritisation process  Ideological limitations – eg. Objective press, propaganda model – what guides journalists and audiences Greg Shackleton Reporter HSV 7 (Melbourne)  Independence movement in East Timor  Executed by the Indonesians  “There were people being herded into school buildings and the buildings set on fire; anyone trying to get out was shot” News values The set of values used to judge the newsworthiness of events Gultang and Ruge suggest 12 news values:  Frequency  Intensity  Unambiguity  Cultural meaningfulness  Consonance (predictability)  Unexpectedness  Continuity  Composition  Reference to elite peoples  Reference to elite nations  Personification  Negativity Why would something so important have such light coverage/none at all?  Relates to the Cold War  East and West communism and capitalism  Indonesia and the West o A year after the culling, Indonesia opened up their economy to a western ideology o The US supplied a list of 5000 people to be executed in East Timor The Propaganda Model  Describes a decentralised and non conspiratorial 5 things that filter the news: 1. Size, ownership and propfit orientation of the mass media 2. Advertising as the primary income source

3. Reliance on state and corporate elites as information sources 4. “Flak: as a means of disciplining the media 5. “Anti-communism” as a control mechanism (or other ideology) Neoliberalism  “Political economic practices that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade”  “The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices Neoliberalism as an idea A political economic project  Advocates a strong market economic system free from state restriction and the use of the market as a model for other areas of political and social life Bound up with:  Privatisation  Deregulation  Marketization: creating markets eg. Univerisities  Individualism: think of ourselves as individuals – not seen as a collective  Entrepreneurialism: game changers, developing a society The Mont Pelerin Society To facilitate an exchange of ideas between like-minded scholars in the hope of strengthening the principles and practice of a free society and to study the workings, virtues and defects of market orientated economic systems  Began where they met at a ski resort  Goal is to enhance the idea of small government  A small group of passionate advocates who gathered around renowned Austrian Friedrich von Hayek Friedrich von Hayek (1899 – 1992)  Likes 19th century classical liberalism  Dislikes early 20th century liberalism The great Society vs The Road to Serfdom  Economic Freedom is the basis for all other types of freedom such as freedom of thought  Individualism vs collectivism  Free markets  Small state

Neoliberalism as a practice Objectives

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To seize and mobilise the power of the state to create pro-corporate, market-driven society To spread their ne ideas across society US 1960-70s o Business sector perceived a threat from federal government legislation because presidents created the environmental protection agency and thought of protecting the environment, tax reform o American business both reinvigorated existing business institutions and developed new ones to protect itself o First it became involved in the production and dissemination of alternative ideas o Second, business used these new theories to contest existing economic ideas and the institutions they had spawned o Business began funding economic institutions/think tanks

Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006)  The Chicago School of Economics  “The Chicago Boys”  Advocated: o Very small government o Tax cuts (especially the rich) o Privatisation o Deregulation o Free markets o Competition: things that hindered this eg labour rights, human rights o Started testing these ideas in Indonesia in the 60’s but was fully implemented in Chile The Washington Consensus 1. Fiscal policy discipline – avoiding large fiscal deficits 2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment 3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates 4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms 5. Ensure competitive exchange rates 6. Trade liberalisation 7. Liberalisation of inward foreign direct investment; 8. Privatisation of state enterprises 9. Deregulation 10. Legal security for property rights     

Cultural variation Influence on media and culture Influence on the ways people understand Their identity Position in society

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What the word means

The UK Case 1980s roll back neoliberalism  The active destruction and discreditation of welfare and social collectivist institutions (Peck and Tickell 2002)  Emphasis on private individuals in distinction to collective groupings  Minimise the size of government, make space for competitive forces and enlarge the scope and reach of the private sector (Tickell and Peck 2003) 1990s – 2000s roll out neoliberalism  Focused on the purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalised state forms; modes of governance and regulatory relations (peck and Tickell 2002)  The state has facilitative, market managerial presence in matters of capital regulation (Tickell and Peck 2003)  It assists in expanding the reach of markets by opening up to it key economic areas through the normalisation of market like practices  Creating new markets where there weren’t markets before eg. Higher education which has changed the soul of the student from somebody who is a student to someone who is a consumer as they have paid for their degree Neoliberalism and the media Commodifying the media Hesmondhalgh 101 1. Telecommunications was understood as a public utility, along the lines of transport or the electricity system; the view that broadcasting was a limited, national resource that governments needed to parcel out; 2. And also the belief that broadcasting had a particular social power which needed controlling 2003 UK Communications Act  Shift in discourse around media regulation  Emergence of citizen-consumer  Reframing of the public as consumers Veneration of entrepreneurialism (False) assumptions  Public sector slow and inefficient  Private sector innovative and efficient...